Monday 8 September 2008 11.10 EDT
First published on Monday 8 September 2008 11.10 EDT

Photograph: AP

In parts, this new profile of Cindy McCain in the New Yorker is almost breathtakingly sad; it certainly makes you wonder why you'd ever marry someone with serious ambitions to be president. Perhaps the amount of deception and concealment inside the McCain marriage isn't all that unusual, but it's her attempt to repackage it as a sequence of charming campaign-trail anecdotes that gives this piece its undertone of desolation. There's the now famous adoption story, which, as Ezra Klein notes, is rather strange when you look at it closely: Cindy decided to add a new member to the family but didn't consult John at all. There's the fact that they both lied to each other about their ages until after their marriage announcement was published in the newspaper. ("We started our marriage on a tissue of lies," she tells one audience "with a smile" in this article. John, as we know, was married and reportedly cohabiting with his current wife at the time he met Cindy.) Less touted by the campaign, naturally, is the story of her painkiller addiction, and how she admitted stealing drugs from a medical charity she'd established; she didn't tell her husband about her problem until she was being investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Then there's the stroke she suffered in 2004 which, she seems to say here, she recovered from with essentially no companionship from John whatsoever. In light of all this, even her stump-speech story about learning to fly without informing him begins to look less merry. (She has also repeatedly called herself an only child, despite having two half-sisters, one of whom, in this piece, is plainly extremely angry with her.)

"The stories that Cindy McCain tells all tend to have the same elements: secrecy, unilateral action, revelation," Ariel Levy writes. "She is a kind of blond Lucille Ball in these tales, always up to something, never wanting to be found out by Ricky. But her madcap (if genteel) fifties-housewife sitcom persona is complicated by the more troublesome aspects of these anecdotes. She often leaves out a detail or two, omissions that change the shade of the story..." [The New Yorker]